Frescos on a Dead Sea: Art, Water and Justice in Central Asia

In 2012, the late French street artist Bilal Berreni (alias Zoo Project) and filmmaker Antoine Page traveled overland across Asia to the Pacific Coast of Russia. They drove a truck full of art supplies and film equipment, stopping along the way to paint and film. Out of their trip came the film C’est assez bien d’être fou (It’s Quite Good Being Crazy) and myriad frescoes in Berreni’s distinctive, black-and-white style.

In the beginning, this wasn’t my project, the martyrs. I’m not into hero worship, it’s a deadly thing. But these martyrs weren’t hotheads, they were innocent victims. In Europe, we absolutely want it to be a cheerful revolution. But this is not the case, what people want most is for those responsible for this nasty war to be arrested. They are seeking reparations. These portraits give them back their voice.

I visited the Aral Sea last month in search of stories of one of history’s greatest environmental catastrophes and of the region’s ongoing recovery. And there, out in the middle of the dry seabed, I found Berreni’s work on the walls of an old, rusted ship. Portraits lined the walls, but this time of fishermen left idle by the disappearance of their sea. The space felt hallowed somehow, both enclosed and open to the great empty sea beyond its walls, the iron rusting into air even as it provided shelter for a clan of small yellow hawks.

Most of the ships that once lay in the main Kazakh harbor have been broken down and sold for scrap or repurposed as walls for camel corrals. But some 60 km away, in the dry seabed outside the former fishing town of Zhalanash, lie four abandoned vessels.In front of an arm of land that once cradled the sea, stands the ship that holds Berreni’s paintings. The sea began receding in the 1960s after Soviet irrigation projects diverted the two main rivers that fed into it. At one time, it was projected to disappear completely by 2020. Since the completion of a dam separating the Kazakh and Uzbek portions of the sea, the Kazakh side has begun to recover. As early as 2006, fishermen were again driving from their homes in old harbor towns across miles of desert to the shoreline to fish.The commercial fish catch has grown steadily along with the water level of the North Aral Sea, and fish processing plants in the area have begun exporting their products to EU countries. But Zhalanash remains a camel-herding town, and the fishing industry will likely take years to fully recover. In Uzbekistan, unsustainable irrigation practices continue to feed thirsty cotton crops, and the sea is still on its way to evaporation. In 2014, the southeastern portion of the sea dried completely for the first time and officially became the Aralkum desert.This was what greeted Bilal Berreni and Antoine Page when they traveled to Zhalanash in 2012. Now, midway through 2016, the New York Times reports that Bolivia’s Lake Poopó “basically disappeared” last December, in large part due to climate change. In both cases, large proportions of the lakeside populations, the latest and possibly last generation to depend on their lake for their livelihood, have made the hard choice to move in search of work. The North Aral’s seaside communities may someday recover, but climate change will continue to threaten similar communities around the world.

A family of hawks makes its home on the second floor of the ship’s main body. As I meandered through the ruins, their calls merged with the sounds of wind and shifting iron.

A little experiment of a video, and following, the segment on the Aral Sea pieces from Berreni and Page’s film:

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fqwatkins

Hi, I'm Forrest. I grew up in Eugene, OR and went to Whitman College, where I studied Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology and Spanish. I loved my time in school (and will probably love it again at some point), but right now it is time for something else. So I am embarking to realize my ever-expanding dream of biking around the world to document the effects of climate change and how everyday people are responding.
For more on the project, check out: http://360bybike.com/the-plan-cycling/
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2 thoughts on “Frescos on a Dead Sea: Art, Water and Justice in Central Asia”

This story has haunted me since I read it. I feel kinship with Bilal’s parents, and with the hawk parents, trying to protect their babies. I wish we could always keep them safe. But we need these people who are idealistic and willing to take risks to show us the best of humanity.